These “proceedings” of the 1982 Congress of Americanists held at Manchester, England, consist mainly of 68 “symposia reports.” which summarize the papers presented and the discussions generated at assorted panels or sessions of the larger meeting. Most of the reports are informative and even incisive, but averaging only about three pages each they can say just enough about sessions of interest to a reader to whet the appetite for more. The compensatory virtue of such brevity is, of course, that the volume includes little enough on those sessions not of interest to permit an almost instantaneous process of skimming.
Up to a point, the hook will indeed serve, as stated by John Lynch in the preface, as “an indication of recent research, and a guide to its future direction” (p. ix). However, it is inevitably a selective indication and guide. The meeting was multidisciplinary, but in practice history and archaeology/anthropology receive far more attention than fields such as literature or political science. Within the history category itself, there is a relative emphasis on the colonial period and, for postcolonial, on economic topics. There was also good representation of European. Latin American, and North American scholarship—except for the usually ubiquitous Argentines, quite a few of whom were prevented from attending because of the recent conflict in the South Atlantic.
